JAMES KUNSTLER: What We Choose

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

The New Urbanists met for their annual confab in Providence over the weekend and I was there among them, as I have been for thirteen years, because there is no other organization in America that is doing more to remediate the fiasco of suburbia -- or, as I call it, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. I have been telling college lecture audiences for a while now that pretty soon the only urbanism will be the New Urbanism. I am not being facetious.

This movement has been broadly misunderstood over the past decade, especially by some of the major morons in the mainstream media, such as David Brooks and John Tierney of The New York Times, who repeatedly make the fatuous argument that suburbia must be okay because Americans overwhelmingly choose to live in it. Well, that's nice. The trouble, though David and John, is that suburbia is coming off the menu. In a world of $70 oil and upward, suburbia is a dish that can no longer be served up in America's economic kitchen. Someone should inform the waiters.

The New Urbanists were first among the entire architecture- and- planning establishment to volunteer to help in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and they have received nothing but scorn and ingratitude for proposing that the Gulf Coast towns be redeveloped as something other than parking lots with casinos, or that FEMA learn how to deliver a well-designed small cottage instead of a trailer to people who have lost their homes. The minions of the elite architecture schools, lead by Reed Kroloff of Tulane University, have been especially dismissive, proposing instead architectural exercises in irony and High Art -- just what people living in tents with no plumbing need.

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http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3659

sorry I had to cut off the "major" part

That sentence alone made this worth reading

He sounds radical enough to come from Bill's seed.